Ethereum Foundation Hit With Wrongful-Termination Suit Over April 6 Firing

Colorado Complaint Names Six Defendants

Kayleen Fulton, who led the Ethereum (ETH) Foundation's protocol support team, filed a complaint on November 4 in the US District Court for the District of Colorado against the Foundation's Swiss entity, its Singapore affiliate, co-executive director Bastian Aue, Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin and two human-resources contractors, six defendants in all. The filing alleges wrongful termination and disability discrimination against the nonprofit that coordinates development of Ethereum's proof-of-stake protocol. For a project whose daily headlines usually track Ethereum (ETH) price, a courtroom fight is an unusual lead story, and it lands after the coin recently broke below $2.17K support, extending a downtrend. According to the complaint, Fulton told management on March 24 that she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and disclosed her treatment plan in writing. Thirteen days later, on April 6, she was dismissed. Per the complaint, the notification gave no performance-related explanation. Trent Van Epps, her co-author on a staff protest letter, was terminated the same day, roughly 30 minutes apart, per the filing. The complaint frames both terminations as violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act, and seeks unpaid wages and benefits, future damages, punitive damages and a declaration that Fulton's severance agreement is void. It also cites a recorded May 1 call between Fulton and Buterin, three and a half weeks after the dismissal, in which Buterin is quoted warning that letting employees win concessions by causing a stir would teach everyone that making noise is how results get achieved inside the Foundation. Fulton's side presents the recording as circumstantial support for a retaliatory motive. The filing does not establish that Buterin directed the terminations. The Foundation's Singapore entity has previously denied, through legal counsel, that any retaliation or unlawful dismissal took place. None of the allegations has been tested in court.

The Source Seppuku License Fight

The dispute traces back to the EF Mandate, an operational charter the Foundation's board circulated to all staff in February 2026. The document codified four core values, censorship resistance, open source, privacy and security, under the shorthand CROPS. Page 11 carried the clause that ignited the conflict: text styled as an open-source license pledge, the “Source Seppuku License,” in which the signatory vows to end their own life with a blade if Ethereum's open-source commitments are broken. The complaint states that 79 employees demanded the passage be deleted, and management answered that the language was symbolic; Aue told staff the reference was “part of the artwork” of the charter, not something to be taken literally. Consent was then handled as mandatory. Aue ordered every employee to return a signed agreement form by a deadline, warning that non-submission would be read as a statement of intent to resign, according to the filing. In late March, Fulton and Van Epps, who had led the deletion campaign, circulated a joint letter signed by 53 employees, about half of the protocol division, rejecting the forced consent and stating they would not resign. Management treated the signatures as an expression of grievance, and every signatory kept their position, the complaint says. On April 6, only the letter's two authors were dismissed. In the termination meeting, Aue acknowledged that Fulton's performance was strong and that colleagues supported her, then declined to give a clear reason for the dismissal, the filing alleges. The final version of the Mandate, published in March, kept the seppuku passage intact, and the text was recorded unchanged on the blockchain. The organization had also just completed a broader restructuring begun in 2025: announced as finished in June, with 54 employees, about 20 percent of staff, departing and operations consolidated into five divisions.

Jurisdiction Comes Before the Merits

The case's first test is procedural. The ADA and the FMLA are US employment statutes, while the operating defendants are incorporated in Switzerland and Singapore, so an early motion to dismiss is the likeliest next entry on the docket. The organizational stakes sit with the team itself. Protocol support is the coordination layer between Foundation researchers and the staking and validator operators, along with Layer 2 teams, who implement upgrades, and the fight lands while those researchers carry an anti-quantum migration deadline of December 2028 and work through 8 invariants that break under Glamsterdam. Whether the Foundation's five-division structure absorbs that disruption is now a question for the court calendar as much as for the protocol roadmap.